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The trip began at Mission's offices, at Lockhill Selma Road and NW Military Highway, with Tony Felan, company vice president, behind the wheel.

A Mission driver always hits the streets with a full tank of gas, a Nextel direct-connect phone and a current Mapsco book of San Antonio streets. They prefer Mapsco to GPS, which is sometimes inaccurate.

It was 10:30 a.m. We had three trips booked. To save time, Felan stacked them so we'd finish one and be close to the next.

First, we'd carry a document from a Medical Center office to an East Side manufacturing plant. Then we'd whip over to a South Side pharmacy and deliver a prescription three miles away. Finally, we'd do another pharmacy run on the West Side.

Easy. Piece of cake. Done by noon, I reckoned.

Expedited delivery is an $8.7 billion business, according to the Messenger Courier Association of America. It fills in gaps left by other conveyance methods. Sensitive documents, urgently needed medicines and proprietary widgets qualify, as do items as varied as dry cleaning, Christmas-party trays and auto parts. Mission hasn't delivered organs, but other local couriers tell me they have done so, and have never delivered the wrong one - abnormal brain, for example - by mistake.

There were glitches during that day's deliveries. A document wasn't ready at one place. On another run, a street sign listed the wrong block numbers. And one pharmacy was closed for lunch when we arrived. But we had finished the jobs - albeit still on the West Side - by 1 p.m. Not bad.

A former Pepsi delivery driver and salesman, Felan joined the company 16 years ago.

"I was like everyone who starts here," he says, laughing. "I said, 'I'm from San Antonio. I know this city like the back of my hand.' "

They don't, and he didn't.

Sure, it's easy to find the H-E-B Super Mercado at Culebra and Bandera. But do you know how to find 8610 N. New Braunfels? Really? Did you know that there's a small slice of North New Braunfels on the outside of Loop 410? Couriers need to know that sort of thing.

Through the years, Felan has learned the fastest routes around town, modified by time of day and traffic. When he got the cancer-clinic delivery, for example, he knew the exact location based simply on the address. He then proceeded to tell me which exits would take us to specific Loop 410 addresses. I'm pretty sure he was showing off.

Felan was unflappable, upbeat and polite the entire time. He didn't speed because he made good time by knowing where to go.

Did I mention he was hardworking? Felan never stopped to eat or drink. And he's got to be rocking Kidneys of Extraordinary Magnitude because we didn't make a single pit stop. After five hours, I had to sneak off, while in the Byzantine maze of the UTHSC, for a toilet break.

Then came a call to move paperwork from a nearby office to somewhere near Fiesta Texas.

It was 3:45. I couldn't take it any longer. I had to bail.

Felan and his remarkable kidneys delivered me back to my car in Mission's parking lot.